Many thanks to all of the contributors in the Apache Ambari community for the collaboration to deliver 1.6.0, especially with Blueprints, a crucial feature that enables rapid instantiation and replication of clusters.

Each release of Ambari makes substantial strides in providing functionality to simplify the lives of system administrators and dev-ops engineers to deploy, manage, and monitor large Hadoop clusters, including those running on Hortonworks Data Platform 2.1 (HDP).

Feature Details

Ambari Blueprints

System administrators and dev-ops engineers requested blueprints to speed the process of provisioning a cluster. Blueprints can be re-used, which facilitates easy configuration and automation for each successive cluster.

As the name suggests, Ambari Blueprints describe the architectural footprint of a stack and how individual components are laid out on each node. A stack definition coupled with a component layout comprises an Ambari Blueprint.

In short, an Ambari Blueprint allows an operator to instantiate a Hadoop cluster quickly—and reuse the blueprint to replicate cluster instances elsewhere, for example, as development and test clusters, staging clusters, performance testing clusters, or co-located clusters.

Ambari Stacks and Stacks REST API

Stacks enable Ambari operators to customize Ambari through a configuration-driven extensibility model. An Ambari Stack defines services, components, configurations, and repositories for a given stack, and wraps them in a consistent operational lifecycle with customizable command scripts. This makes plugging in and extending Ambari possible with minimal coding via a Stack Definition. Ambari 1.6.0 exposes these Stack definitions via the Stacks REST API.

PostgreSQL Support

Ambari now extends database support for Ambari DB, Hive and Oozie to include PostgreSQL. This means that Ambari now provides support for the key databases used in enterprises today: PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle. The PostgreSQL configuration choice is reflected in this database support matrix.

Comments

I upgrade from 1.5.0 to 1.6.0 and was able to get it running after few minor challenges.

1. Lost zookeeper server service, Unable to add a new host with zookeeper server.
2. Now that i have a cluster created , how can i save it as a “blueprint”, web interface does not have any interface to it.